By Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker, October 1, 2012

I. CHURCH

This summer, I spent most of an afternoon in Salt Lake City with Douglas Anderson, a friend of Mitt Romney’s. Anderson lives in a housing development in the foothills of the mountains that rise to the east of the city. We met in his living room, which leads to a patio with a view across the Great Basin—[....] Anderson, a bald, amiable man in his early sixties, is a Democrat, but, like Romney, he is a Mormon, with deep roots in Utah; he is part of the business-school and management-consulting worlds; and his father always made it clear that holding a high political office would be the excellent culmination of a career. In Belmont, Massachusetts, where both men lived for years, Anderson was the Romney family’s “home teacher,” assigned by the Church to pay monthly visits to support the family and its religious life and to offer a little guidance [....]

Anderson told me an almost surreal story about his first encounter with Romney, in 1968 [....]

Another Mormon friend who shares Romney’s background (church, business school, long residence in Belmont, Massachusetts) is Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and renowned management guru. He remembers first encountering Romney in an economics class at Brigham Young University, in 1970 [....]